The Film Experience

by Brent Calderwood

A century after its March 4th, 1922, premiere in Berlin, F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu remains a truly chilling classic. It’s widely acknowledged that Nosferatu and other German Expressionist masterpieces were influential not only to the development of Hollywood horror, but also to film noir and other genres. Nothing demonstrates the shadowy reach of Expressionism quite so strikingly, though, as its prevalence in the first wave of Walt Disney’s full-length features, which quoted heavily from Murnau and his contemporaries...

As Snow White animator and character designer Marc Davis, who became a member of Walt Disney’s ennead of top artists known as the “Nine Old Men,” told Crimmer’s (The Harvard Journal of Pictorial Fiction) in 1975:

Anything that might produce growth, that might be stimulating—the cutting of the scenes, the staging, how a group of scenes were put together… The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Nosferatu were things that we saw. I remember Metropolis…had a very strong impact on me.

Here are the top times Expressionism crept into early Disney films:

01 Nosferatu (1922) and Snow White (1937)
A nighttime forest’s gnarled branches and looming presence evoke Max Schreck’s ersatz Dracula.

02 Nosferatu (1922) and Dumbo (1941)

Timothy Q. Mouse invades the Ringmaster’s REM cycle to convince him to make Dumbo the star of the elephant show.

03 Faust (1926) and Fantasia (1940)

Emil Jannings’s batlike Mephisto inspired Danish illustrator Kay Nielson and Ukrainian-American animator Vladimir “Bill” Tytla to create Disney’s most menacing character, Chernabog, for the “Night on Bald Mountain” sequence in Fantasia.

04 Metropolis (1927) and Snow White (1937)

Fritz Lang’s iconic eye montage in a metropolitan men’s club eerily predicts the superimposed peepers that would glower down at Snow White in her sylvan hellscape a decade later.

05 The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and Fantasia (1940)

A shadowy Caligarian staircase reappears in Fantasia’s “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” sequence costarring Mickey Mouse and a moody, paternalistic wizard named “Yen Sid,” who was modeled by animators after his palindromic namesake.

Honorable Mentions: Expressionist Shadowplay

Sinister silhouettes mask the ghastliest moments in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Pinocchio (1940), and “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” sequence in Fantasia. Shown above: the famous murder scene from Robert Wiene’s game-changing proto-thriller, the juvenile delinquent Lampwick transformed into a literal jackass before Pinocchio’s astonished wooden eyes, and Mickey taking an axe to a sentient broom.